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With Curi™ we help you stay on track with your life but to stay on track you need to start off on the right track. The better you can describe your situation to your doctor and the better you understand what your doctor has told you you need to do to get or stay healthy, the better.

So, starting before your next doctor’s appointment, what can you do to better prepared to get the most out of your visit.

""So?" you ask. "How do you make a killer app?" Well, as our CEO and Mother of inspiration, Julie, would tell you it starts with you tossing and turning in bed kicking yourself while reliving how your son’s medications got botched. It is anger, frustration and fear roiling together. Thankfully things turned out alright. It could have been much worse.

Pain pill or vitamin? This is a question straight out of the reality TV show Shark Tank where ‘contestants’ pitch their businesses to real life investors to convince them to invest in their business. The question is really, “Is this an app people need now?” No. Yesterday, because the pain is killing them. Or is this more like a vitamin? It’s good for you and it may help you stay healthy and whatnot but if you didn’t buy it you might not miss it. You might not even be able to prove it’s helping. Make no mistake. When a Shark asks this question they almost always want to hear only one answer—Pain pill. No one beats a path to your door for a better vitamin.

In a recent report, Valuing the Invaluable, 2015 Update, the AARP estimated the value of family caregiving in the United States in 2013 at $470 billion (http://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2015/valuing-the-invaluable-2015-update-new.pdf). That’s more than total Medicaid spending, more than the total of Americans’ out-of-pocket medical expenses, and almost as much as Walmart’s sales for that year. The way Semafores sees things, this number is undoubtedly too low. The AARP is concerned with issues affecting older Americans and the definition of family caregiver that they used for this study included only those people who provided unpaid care for elderly or disabled adults. Another report, Caregiving in the U.S. 2015, from the AARP, in association with the National Alliance for Caregiving, looked at family caregiving in a wider context and found that 10.2 million people provided care for children with special needs, often caring for an adult as well. (http://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2015/caregiving-in-the-united-states-2015-executive-summary-revised.pdf). The value of this care provided to children was not even considered in the economic impact study.